‘Protection’ on my own terms: human smuggling and unaccompanied Syrian minors

ABSTRACT

Child migration has generated shock, the global public appalled by photos of corpses of children washed ashore or abandoned in deserts. However, despite the growing visibility of child migration there has been scant research into the practices and interactions often associated with the smuggling of minors. We still lack a clear understanding of the interactions between minors and smugglers that go beyond a stereotypical predator/victim frame. This paper is grounded in the conviction that any understanding of the complex interactions between minors and migrant smugglers requires an epistemic reversal in conventional learning and debate. Instead of investigating the systematic exploitation of vulnerable migrants at the hands of criminal rings, we need to focus on the capacity of minors to exert agency and craft new spheres of possibility in situations characterised (also) by exploitation and extreme dependence. The article does so by investigating the day-to-day interactions between facilitators and Syrian minors who left their country following the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. What will be shown is that minors’ interactions with human smuggling provide them with new forms of action, while contending with exploitation, constraints or dependency.

KEYWORDS:

• Minors
• irregular migration
• human smuggling
• agency
• exploitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Article 1 of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a child (or a minor) is any human being below the age of 18 years, regardless of his/her level of maturity, unless the laws applicable to the child in a given country state otherwise. Numerous studies have demonstrated how terms like ‘minor’ and ‘child’ obscure the vulnerability as well as the capabilities of those who fall under these categories. Hashim and Thorsen, for example, have pointed to the lack of utility of the Western concept of ‘childhood’ in many African societies where adulthood is embedded in social relations and generational hierarchies, rather than in terms of chronological age and cognitive development (2011). In this article, I use the term ’minor’ (or ’child’) only in operational terms, to refer to a specific legal and discursive category with which some individuals are daily confronted and, at times, use themselves.

2 I build on a growing body of research that argues how the language of crisis has been used to justify highly exclusionary and discriminatory migration policies and practices (see, among others, De Genova et al. 2016), especially in connection with the figure of the unaccompanied minor (Lems, Oester, and Strasser 2020).